Flexible Displays Nearing Vision of ePaper

One of the holy grails in display technology is the thin and flexible color display. Not only will it enable ever lighter and less-fragile devices like next-generation tablets, eventually we could be taking these “tablets”, rolling them up and stuffing them in our pockets like a Batman comic.

The Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI) in Taiwan has pushed impressively closer to this vision with a .1mm-thick flexible AMOLED display measuring 6 inches. Called FlexUPD, they say the display can withstand up to 15,000 repetitions of being rolled to a radius of 5cm or less, then flat again.

If this technology breaks out of the lab and makes it to market we should be seeing phones and tablets that make today’s trimmest models look impossibly bulky by comparison.

About Dave Peterson

Dave lives near Seattle, Washington, surrounded by evergreen trees and flat panel displays. His special gadget interest is tablets and the pursuit of the perfect digital reading experience - especially digital comics. He is the Editor-in-Chief of GeekBeat.TV.

Comments

Flexible displays are great, but the hardest part will be a flexible capacitive touch and EMR writing layers, not to mention flexible microprocessors, ICs, and circuitry. Still, this is pretty awesome: if we could get digital paper like they have on Caprica, that would be fantastic.

Making displays with this new & innovative screen material will most certainly happen, however part of what makes some of our devices a little thick, is a strong frame to protect the display, support hardware & electronics (most specifically from *puncture* type damages). But what we’ve really been missing in a display, is a curved screen. I would love to see a clamshell cellphone *truly* in the curved shape of a clam, actually warped, instead of the typical boring flat planed screen shape… “B”